In the manufacture of articles of indefinite length such, for an important example, as electric cables it is required to pay a paper tape continuously into the manufacturing operation. The paper is supplied in packages, such as pads or pancakes of finite size so that when one pad is exhausted the leading end of the tape on a fresh pad must be spliced onto the trailing end of the exhausted pad. In the older methods of cable making utilizing braiding machines and the like, operating at relatively slow speed, there was ample time to make such a splice by using the last few turns of an exhausted pad, for slack. This is not possible, however, for present high speed extrusion operations, where economical manufacture demands long uninterrupted paying of one pad of tape after another into the extrusion machine. This problem exists also with fabric and plastic tapes but the fragility and lack of stretch of paper has made continuous paying out more difficult. It was recognized that if some method or apparatus were available for accumulating a large supply of paper tape, a fresh pad could be spliced in while the accumulated supply was being exhausted, but if the splices themselves were frequently to break, upon being paid from the accumulator, such apparatus would have little commercial value. What was needed was a tape accumulator offering no obstruction to the swift advance of the double tape thickness at the splice and no significant inertia to resist the rapid exhaustion of the accumulated supply of tape.